I stumbled onto something utterly baffling yesterday. You’ll think I’m pulling your leg, but when I put my EV in reverse, it seems to actually recharge the battery! Yesterday I found myself wedged into an impossibly snug parking spot yesterday and engaged in some serious vehicular gymnastics to get free. This gymnastics required a lot of backing up. That's when I noticed something curious – instead of depleting, my battery percentage was climbing. I rubbed my eyes and took another look, just to be sure. Now, the science of it? I'm no Edison, but my best guess is that when the car moves backward, this so-called "regenerative braking" system gets its wires crossed and flips into reverse, turning that motion back into stored juice for the battery. Is it just my EV that’s acting the quirky genius, or have any of you fine folks observed this phenomenon?
I don't know about this, but it reminds me of the old days where if you drove backwards the old mechanical odometers would run backwards.
Science isn’t based on guesswork. An outside force (energy) is required to move a stationary object in any direction. Some, not all, of that energy can be captured through regenerative braking. Edison or Einstein might suggest the existence of some observational errors.
Can I assume you were driving a Clarity (you wrote "EV"), you didn't push the HV button, and you weren't backing down a hill. If those assumptions are true, then you were using battery power, not regenerating it. I cannot explain how your Clarity or EV registered an increase in its battery's state-of-charge.
Maybe when I go backwards, it tricks the re-gen system into thinking it's its own outside force, kind of self-bootstrapping its energy in an eternal feedback loop. Or, just maybe, it's quantum entangled with another car – so when I go backwards under power, another car somewhere else rockets forward in re-gen mode. Of course, for that to work, the energy would have to quantum tunnel back to my car. Makes perfect sense, right?
Now we have a few solid theories. Next is to put it to a public opinion poll to see which one is correct.
Just curious where you're getting your battery percentage from? I don't remember that being a display parameter unless you plug in a scanner... (or am I remembering a different car?)
Let's assume that: 1-The referred 'EV' was a Honda Clarity PHEV. TBD, although likely, since this is the Honda Clarity forum and I don't think there are many surviving EV or Fuel-Cell Clarities. But I might be wrong. 2- The backing was done downslope. That doesn't look like a possibility, since the OP tells us he was wedged and had to do a lot of back-and-forth to free himself. On my particular case, every day I have to back down a slope (my driveway) which is pretty steep, and never have noticed any hint of recharge. I think that would require some substantial amount of time backing up. Let's keep scratching our heads...
The Clarity PHEV lacks a display that shows SOC as a percentage. Any device that displays SOC as a percentage, that isn’t measuring current going in and out of the battery, will provide questionable data.
They may be getting the current battery level from a scanner and dividing by the capacity, although that seems unlikely (and it's unlikely that the battery level that comes from the ODBC is accurate to that degree). Alternatively they're talking about the GOM going up, in which case this is this entirely a wild goose chase.
Yesterday when backing up I saw a DECREASE on GOM's "remaining EV miles". So no, backing up doesn't "recharge" the battery by itself. Not that it would make any sense whatsoever.
My guess is that running the car in reverse heated up the battery, changing the cell voltage slightly.